The Five Times
by Milli Moi
Summary: For a person who has lived so long and seen so much, five experiences of the same thing have stayed with Natasha Romanoff. The Fifth, she hopes will be the last and - she hopes - the time when she gets it right. M rating is currently a warning but there may be sexual scenes as the story progresses.
1. Chapter 1

The first time it happened Natasha was almost sure she had known instantly. She had known because it wasn't like the other times, Nikolai was not like the other man - most of which had beer bellies and smelt of cigars. With him she felt something different, it wasn't uncomfortable to be together, it wasn't uncomfortable with his body inside hers.

This had not been the first time she had lain with a man, the Russia of her youth had very different laws regarding sexual consent. Natasha had many memories of these men, of it feeling sore and wrong, of them getting angry because she cried out or bled a little on the sheets.

It was part of her training, she had to learn to seduce, she needed every man to believe the experience felt good but she couldn't act something she had never experienced.

Nikolai has held her in his lap, she had grasped at his back with flat palms, buried her face in the crook of his neck so far that she could feel her own hot, panting breath back on her cheeks.

He held her, one strong hand on her skull, fingers messed up in her red hair. He wanted her close, as close as she wanted him.

That night Natasha remembered the warmth in her lower belly, the feeling of his seed inside her but there was more. The heat didn't seem to leave. It wasn't unpleasant, it was soft and calming, she felt it in her heart that this was the heat of a baby beginning to grow, a baby which was possible, one conceived of love.

Nikolai has held her in his arms as the heat in their bodies dissipated and they began to shiver despite the fire only two feet away. Natasha had never known comfort, not even in childhood, but in the arms of this young soldier she could relax in a way she had never done before.

She remembered lying there, remembered him covering their naked bodies with a caribou hide - the warmest of blankets in the subzero Siberian winter. She told him then, looking into his blue eyes. Nikolai has laughed, how could she have known she carried a baby already.

She had been right. If only their path had been different. They both had a job to do. Natasha continued to do night watches, taking her turn in the six hours before dawn with her rifle at her side and a concealed pistol strapped to her thigh. She didn't feel so sick when she worked.

Natasha continued to walk miles each day, 10 sometimes 20 miles in the deep snow. After a day of hard walking and sweating in their thick clothes she had undressed fully to see her belly was becoming rounder and a faint brown line ran down the centre, split only by her belly button.

Natasha had held strong, kept her eye on the crosshairs and the crosshairs on the target, pointing the barrel of her rifle out into the field, balancing a box of ammunition on her much bigger belly.

She was sore that day, her back aches and she was sure she should not be anchoring a heavy sub-machine against her shoulder. The men had ventured out, cautiously across a field. Natasha watched to sidelines for any glint of sun on metal which would indicate another sniper like herself. She may have been trained for far more than this but given she couldn't run very well due to the baby and that the small group could not risk anyone seeing her belly, she was resigned to sniper duties.

That was the day it changed. That was the day where Natasha's possibility of a future was gone for good. The day of the scarlet snow. Natasha saw the glint of the sniper's rifle but she was too late. There wasn't one. It was an ambush of at least twenty men with sub-machines. Her troop died on that field. All of them, all men under thirty. Nikolai- the father of her child, the man she had promised to marry - died at eighteen years old.

It was three days later the physical pain came to an end. The baby was dead, it had died in the womb. The physical pain was gone but the emotional pain, losing her future husband, her daughter and subsequently her freedom, those would live on with her for the rest of her life.

Every year she made the trip back, every year, even after she defected to the USA, after the Avengers initiative, until the end of her life. The temperatures could be extreme, and several times tears would freeze solid on her cheeks. Still she went, still she left a black rose, in memory of the family that she had felt slip through her fingers and out of existence.

And that was the first time Natasha Romanoff lost a baby.


	2. Chapter 2

The second time it happened it acted as proof, confirmed what Natasha was sure she already knew. Whatever dodgy and possibly counterfeit chemicals they had pumped into her body all those years ago, had effected everything. She would never be normal again.

It was a good shot, she gave him that, even biting down on the scrap of a white shirt she had ripped from the engineer, she appreciated the work of this masked man. His build was all that gave an indication to his gender, the breadth of his shoulders, the swagger he walked with, the lack of hips. Otherwise, she had nothing to go on. A mask had covered his mouth and nose, dark glasses covered his eyes and long hair covered most of the rest.

She rolled onto her side, clicking the morphine drip once more. The bullet had been out at the scene, the close range meaning it had traveled right through her body and into the engineer behind her. She had tried to dodge and the bullet, as a result, had missed all vital organs, only clipping and splintering a chunk of her bottom rib which had to be fished out.

She has woken from the surgery to find a scrap of the Engineer's shirt still in her hand. His name was Luke, he had two kids and a dog. He was getting married to his second wife the following week. Not anymore. Natasha knew he was dead before anyone told her, she had seen the entrance angle, and despite her combat first aid training she wasn't confident at a tracheotomy - she would have made it worse.

She saw the black guy in dark leather out the glass window of her side room. Fury. He was speaking to a Nurse, clearly trying to get as much as he could on what had happened.

It was strange to Natasha, almost comforting, to have someone who cared for her welfare - to have anyone at all turn up to see her lying in a hospital bed.

It was seeing him there, the man that she had a growing admiration for, that she decided not to tell. If it was a typical time, a typical nature then she wouldn't have told her boss so why should the atypicality of her body mean that she had to alert Fury.

She wasn't planning on telling Barton either - he was a good guy, stuck to his code and for some strange reason, he had seen good in her no one else ever had.

Besides Barton was on leave, his wife - who no one other than herself and Fury knew about, had just had their second baby. Natasha felt he deserved the time with his new family member. He didn't need to know that she was experiencing the very opposite.

The doctor, announcing his findings to her, had made her eyes widen - something that did not happen often in her career path. She had presumed, after Nikolai and after the rest of the dodgy set of drugs were given to her, that there was a reason it hadn't happened again, that she couldn't.

Now she had been told she was to have a D and C, a surgical clean out of her womb. She had been told she had recently suffered a miscarriage, but that it had happened before the accident which brought her to the hospital, another day or two and she would have gone septic. They told her she had been about ten weeks pregnant, judging by the hormone levels in her blood and what they had seen on their ultrasound equipment. The foetus had died inside her but hadn't come away. She didn't know, she had felt no different, she had no reason to think she had been pregnant.

It was as she had thought, her body had rejected the embryo, her body had fought and killed its own creation. Maybe it was for the best, her life was hostile, and would be even more so to a pregnancy. It was for the best that she would never carry a baby again, it was for the best that pregnancy was not a possibility. It had taken years of unprotected sex for her to become pregnant at all.

No, she was not made to be a mother, not on the inside or the outside.

That was the second time Natasha Romanoff lost a baby.


End file.
